Christmas At The Cupcake Cafe (10 page)

‘So we’re going full Christmas,’ said Pearl in a resigned tone of voice.

‘They’re polar bears,’ said Issy. ‘Polar bears are for life, Pearl, not just Christmas. Anyway,’ she added, ‘it’s the first of December today! It’s Advent! It’s all official! Ta-dah!’

She unveiled her
pièce de résistance
from her shoulder bag: a huge Advent calendar. It was in the shape of a traditional snow-coloured village, and the brightly coloured windows of the houses formed the numbers of the calendar.

‘First child every morning gets to open a door. Except for Louis.’

Louis looked up from where he was sitting engrossed in a book about frogs.

‘Do you have your own calendar?’ she asked.

Louis nodded gravely.

‘Grammy did give me one. It has sweeties. I get chocolate every day! And Daddy gave me one too.’

Issy looked at Pearl.

‘Don’t look at me,’ said Pearl, who had some trouble watching Louis’ weight. ‘I told them both,’ she said. ‘I took one of them away.’

‘For
the poor children,’ said Louis gravely. ‘Poor, poor children. I kept Grammy’s because I ate that first.’

‘OK, good,’ said Issy. ‘Don’t open this one, if you don’t mind. You can open the big doors on Christmas Eve.’

Louis studied it carefully. ‘Issy!’ he said urgently. ‘It has no chocolate left, Issy!’

‘Not all Advent calendars have chocolate, Louis.’

‘Yes! They do!’ said Louis. ‘I think a robber came.’

‘Well, I’m glad I’m not going to have too much trouble keeping you away from it,’ said Issy.

She unfolded the calendar on top of the fireplace. It looked lovely, but wouldn’t stay up.

‘Hmm, I wonder what would keep that up?’ she said. ‘Oh, I know. Perhaps this long rope of holly I just happen to have in my bag.’

Pearl snorted. ‘Yeah, all right,’ she said. ‘You’ve made your point.’

‘Did you know who started with the holly and the ivy?’ said Issy cheerfully.

‘Baby Jesus!’ hollered Louis.

‘Well, yes,’ said Issy. ‘But also the Romans. And mistletoe is from even further back, from the Druids, their midwinter festival.’

Pearl sold another six polar bear cakes and didn’t say anything. Caroline turned up to let Issy get back downstairs to the baking. Her face fell when she saw the holly on the fireplace.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’ve
decided to go with red and green, have you?’

‘At Christmas?’ said Issy. ‘Well. Yes, funnily enough.’

‘But there’s so many more chic ways to do it!’ said Caroline. ‘I was thinking maybe an all-silver motif, or those clear plastic trees they do in the Conran shop? So stylish.’

‘If I wanted to be stylish, I wouldn’t wear clothes from a catalogue,’ said Issy. ‘I want it to be nice and cosy and comfortable, not scary like those posh places where they make you sit on jaggedy chairs and everyone is blonde and skinny and wears leather trousers …’

Realising she was exactly describing Caroline, Issy fell silent. Fortunately Caroline, despite having zero body fat, managed to be very thick-skinned.

‘We’ll never make it into the
Super Secret London Guide
,’ she said. ‘They choose the most select hidden shops of the year and run a special issue. There’s a prize for the most stylishly decorated.’

‘We will not,’ said Issy. ‘I will try and get through it as stoically as I can.’

Caroline pouted. ‘Don’t you want to at least make the effort? They run a special supplement in January.’

‘The problem is,’ said Pearl, ‘if we were in it, we’d fill the shop with other people who looked like you. And people that look like you are bad for turnover. Don’t eat enough cakes.’

‘Yes, but we take up less room,’ pleaded Caroline. ‘So you can fit more
of us in. And let’s face it, we’ll pay almost anything for a smoothie, especially if it’s green.’

Issy smiled. ‘Well, even so. We wouldn’t win and I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing stupid stuff.’

‘You might,’ said Caroline. ‘And it might bump you up the ladder a bit. It’s time you were expanding anyway. That’s how the Bastard grew his business. Well, I think. He used to talk about it, but I didn’t really listen, obviously – very boring.’

‘I will never understand why you two split up,’ murmured Pearl.

‘At least I was a married mother,’ sniffed Caroline.

Thankfully, the bell tinged, and Helena entered, carrying Chadani. She had a gigantic buggy that had cost about as much as a small car, with personally commissioned muff, hood, foot cosy and car seat in pink and purple tiger stripes, so that from a distance it looked, as Austin had pointed out (quietly), like a small monster that had just eaten a baby, then exploded. It didn’t fit up the stairwell of their apartment, through the doorway of most shops or in the boot of their Fiat, so Helena regularly left it in the middle of the pavement, which managed to make it look even more like a monster, and meant it got in absolutely everybody’s way. This didn’t stop her from recommending it as the very best in buggies to everyone she met. Issy was rather grateful it didn’t fit inside, but she’d had to insist that Helena chain it to the little tree that grew in their courtyard, after she kept leaving it
outside the door and it tripped up four people in one morning (it had an extra, malevolent wheel that jutted out the front, and was used mostly to jar people’s heels at pelican crossings).

‘Hello!’ said Issy cheerily, glad she wouldn’t have to break up Pearl and Caroline. ‘Hello, Chadani!’

Chadani yelled and contorted her face.

Issy looked at Helena.

‘Tell me that isn’t real fur.’ Chadani was practically buried in a huge fur coat with a matching bonnet and her pale pink Uggs.

‘No!’ said Helena. ‘But doesn’t she look so CUUUUTE? Ashok’s great-aunt wants to pierce her ears.’

Issy didn’t say anything to this, but kissed Chadani on her little button nose. Once you got past all the fluff and nonsense, she was a very endearing baby.

Chadani smiled cheerfully and pointed at the largest cake on the stand, winter raspberry with pink icing confection that Issy, in whimsical mood, had covered in sparkly stars. They were very pretty and shiny, she conceded.

‘WAAAH!’ shouted Chadani.

‘Will I get one for you to share?’ said Issy, firing up a cappuccino for Helena.

‘Oh, Chadani doesn’t really like to share,’ said Helena. ‘She’s a bit young to be forced into that, don’t you think?’

‘It’s a very big cake,’ said Issy.

‘Yes,’ said Helena. ‘You really shouldn’t have made them so large. You have to think about children too.’

Issy
decided not to roll her eyes, and put another batch of bear cakes into the oven. Then she decided to take a quick break – Pearl and Caroline weren’t talking to one another, which made them both work really quickly and efficiently in a gigantic huff – and sat down next to Helena, who was looking at toys in the Argos catalogue whilst Chadani made shorter work of a gigantic cupcake than Issy would have believed a one-year-old capable of.

‘Hey,’ said Issy.

‘Do you know,’ said Helena, flicking through the catalogue, ‘Chadani has every single one of these, just about. They really need to invent some new toys.’

‘You love having a daughter, don’t you?’ said Issy, suddenly.

Helena beamed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘yes. Yes, I do. I mean, obviously we got a very special child, not everyone gets that. But yes. In general. I mean, obviously, it can be …’ She stopped herself. ‘Yes. It’s wonderful. So when are you and Austin going to get to it, then?’

Issy bit her lip. Ever since they’d got together … well, everyone had just seemed to think that it was the end to a fairy tale, a happy ever after; there was Austin and Issy, and wasn’t it funny, she fell in love with her bank manager, ha ha, bet she’ll never be short of a few bob, ha, well, you can guess where he’s putting his deposits … oh, she’d heard all the jokes. And now it was more than a year ago, and everyone was expecting some kind of announcement,
or at least for something to happen. But Austin’s work had gone on and on and she’d got caught up in the shop and moving, and, well …

Something in her expression penetrated Helena’s baby haze.

‘You two are all right, aren’t you? There’s nothing wrong? I refuse to believe there’s anything wrong. After all the goat’s arseholes you’ve dated, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. Don’t you dare. I mean it. I’ll march Austin round at gunpoint. I will put him in a wrestling hold. I will remove his horn-rimmed glasses and stuff them up his—’

‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ said Issy hastily. ‘I’m sure he’s just … you know, a bit caught up in New York and a bit excited. That’s all. Nothing bad.’

The doorbell rang. Issy looked up. It was a delivery service. She wasn’t expecting anything.

‘Issy Randall?’ the man in the uniform said.

Issy signed for the box, noticing with excitement that it was from Austin.

‘AHA!’ she said. ‘Look! I shouldn’t have mentioned anything! Look! He’s sent me a present from New York!’

Helena beamed as Issy cut through the brown tape. ‘Hurrah! Now never think badly of him again! You need a relationship like Ashok and me.’

‘What, where you tell him what to do and he lies down and kisses the ground you walk on? Hmmm,’ said Issy, but she was smiling with happiness.

Inside was a
bright green box, wrapped with a paler, pistachio-coloured ribbon.

The girl in the New York cupcake shop was called Kelly-Lee. She was very pretty, with a snub nose and wide grey eyes and a few light freckles that looked as though they were dusted on like icing sugar. Her hair was thick and auburn, in a high ponytail, and she wore the pink polo shirt uniform of the shop in a way that was pert but not too sexy.

She’d been so excited to move to New York – Queens, to be precise – to finish her masters, but she was finding it hard to make ends meet. Everything was so expensive, and she’d hoped to find a good job – like Ugly Betty – on a cool magazine, or in an art gallery or with a photographer. She’d been a bit shocked to find out that those jobs didn’t actually pay any money; you were expected to work for free – how you paid for food didn’t seem to come into it – which clearly meant that any of the cooler jobs were only open to really rich people, which seemed unbelievably wrong and had opened up a distinct glow of unfairness in a life that up to now had been nicely skewed in her favour, as she was pretty and clever and had grown up in a happy Wisconsin family.

So she had taken this stopgap job to make ends meet, but now it had dragged on for three years and none of the other cool stuff seemed to be happening, and frankly she was getting
tired of it. That was before she even got to the New York men. She’d been asked out, of course, and had been wined and dined by handsome guys, sexy guys, crazy guys, nice guys, and every single one of them had asked her at the end of the evening if she wouldn’t mind remaining non-exclusive, and every single time Kelly-Lee had said no. She was worth more than that. She was sure of it. But it was getting a bit tiring waiting around. Her roommate Alesha thought she was a buttoned-up idiot, but then Kelly-Lee had noticed Alesha get home several times early in the morning with her silver dress still on from the night before, so she was trying not to pay too much attention to what Alesha thought. Then, after two years she’d changed her mind on that one too. Sure enough, the guys that said they were going to call called her about the same as before – i.e., not at all. But at least she occasionally woke up with someone in her bed. Alesha had smiled unpleasantly and made remarks about Little Miss Snooty being brought down a peg or two, and how you had to kiss a lot of frogs. Then Alesha had moved out with someone that she’d met, and Kelly-Lee felt more alone than ever.